And another week passes us by. This week we were informed about two projects replacing some GNU software with alternatives, FreeBSD, KDE, OpenOffice.org, and Windows 7 did new releases, Psystar replied to Apple's allegations (and the Apple world completely ignored it), and Chrome users were the most up-to-date with their browsers. This week's my take is a prelude to the one for next week.

The problem seems to be unique to Apple sites. What seems to happen is that once you start to court Apple people, you go down an awful path which extinguishes real critical journalism. To my mind, Ars has gone down there, but is now tiptoeing back.

The Apple readers are avid consumers of any news or gossip however trivial that puts Apple in a good light, and fierce trashers of anything at all critical. They also are avid enthusiasts of any stories which relate to the experience of being an Apple buyer or user. So this leads to stories like those appearing on Ars where they show you a series of photos of someone opening a cardboard carton and taking out a bit of computer or phone, and head that section 'The Out of Box Experience'. Jacqui Cheng is the worst example. That idiotic recent 'story' about some nutter who had painted his keyboard white to match his iMac or some such piece of vapid gossipy personal interest story.

The result is that gradually people stop writing or publishing critical journalism in that forum. Every competitor of Apple is then regarded as Bad. Everything Apple does is Good. Even if, and maybe especially if, it is the opposite of what Apple did last week.

Psystar has become a sort of villain for the Apple people for no other reason than that they take a different view of the law. But in the eyes of the Apple enthusiasts, they disagree, so they are Bad. Actually, something interesting is at stake in the Psystar case, and its to do with our freedom. But you'd never guess that from Infinite Loop.

We finally end up with what started out as a journal publishing articles with no particular point of view on the industry, turning into a mixture of this and an Apple fanzine. The next step is to segregate the craziness, and so we end up with Infinite Loop. In the process we gained yet another fanzine, and lost another outlet for normal critical journalism about Apple.

Thom is right - it doesn't exist. The fans, inspired by Cupertino Marketing, will do everything they can to eliminate it. OSNews is about the only place on the net that has not succumbed to this. Keep it up.